Searching for a lawyer can be a little painful. Obviously, it’s a more involved pursuit than shopping for a blender or an air fryer. When a person looks for a lawyer, they’re looking for someone who might help them keep their house, their kids, or even their freedom.
So, naturally, they do what the modern human does when the stakes are as high as they get: open a browser and start typing away at that search bar.
That’s why link building for lawyers isn’t really about “winning SEO” the way it can be in other industries. When the stakes are as high as this, it becomes more about building public, third-party proof that your firm is reputable and worth contacting.
And links, the web’s version of references, fit perfectly into this. In legal marketing, references matter.
Why Link Building Matters for Law Firms
Let’s start with the obvious part. People research legal issues online before contacting an attorney, and they do so in huge numbers. Martindale-Avvo’s Legal Consumer Report 2024 puts that behavior in black and white, showing that the vast majority of legal consumers research their legal issue online before reaching out.
Source: Martindale-Avvo
Now add the fact that Google uses one signal above all others to judge “quality,” and that’s whether other prominent sites link to (or refer to) a piece of content. In plain English, if reputable sites point at you, Google treats that as a sign you’re trustworthy.
That means that even if you write the most helpful page on earth, Google still wants confidence that it’s coming from a legitimate source, not some internet rando with strong opinions and a Canva subscription.
What if I operate only locally?
Local search has its own gravity. Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and prominence. You can’t control distance, but you can improve relevance with great pages and a complete profile, and you build prominence with real-world signals, including mentions and links.
That last one is where many firms get stuck. They try to manufacture prominence with a stack of directory links that look impressive in a spreadsheet, but do nothing in reality. Meanwhile, the firms that come out on top are the ones that earn a smaller number of better, context-appropriate mentions across the legal and local ecosystem.
What Good Links Do for Law Firms
A backlink is rarely just a ranking signal. It’s also a reputation signal, a referral source, and often a conversion assist (because people click the thing and then judge you). Here’s a quick overview of what that can look like in practice:
| What the link influences | Why it matters for lawyers | Real-world example |
|---|---|---|
| Organic visibility | Competitive practice areas need authority signals | A DUI page starts competing for “DUI lawyer + city” |
| Local prominence | Off-site mentions can reinforce local credibility | Local news site covers your firm’s pro bono work |
| Trust + conversion | People look for third-party validation | Prospects recognize your name from a bar association page |
| Referral leads | Some links send actual cases | A niche association directory sends you qualified inquiries |
In legal marketing, links are often proof that you exist outside your own website. That’s valuable even when rankings don’t instantly jump.
All that being said, we should point out that even well-known SEO datasets suggest links aren’t the only big lever anymore, and their impact depends on query type and competitiveness. Ahrefs’ research (reacting to Google’s “links matter less” messaging) basically says that links may be less dominant overall, but they still matter, especially in certain SERPs.
The critical distinction is that, for lawyers, those “certain SERPs” are exactly the ones that pay your rent.
Source: Ahrefs
If you’re in a competitive metro, or you practice in categories where ads, directories, and big publishers crowd page one, you’re not going to finesse your way into visibility with on-page tweaks alone. You need authority signals, and links are still a major part of that.
Our Lawyer-Specific Link-Building Tips
Law is local, regulated, reputation-heavy, and full of topics where you can’t casually promise outcomes or hand-wave nuance. So, these tips are built around earning links you can be proud of, from places that make sense for attorneys.
1. Build linkable practice-area pages
A surprising number of law firm practice pages boil down to: “We do X. We are amazing. Call us.”
Not exactly link bait, is it?
A linkable practice-area page does two jobs at once. It can convert a prospect and serve as a genuinely useful reference that a journalist, local organization, or adjacent professional might cite.
What usually makes the difference is specificity and proof. Instead of just saying “we handle personal injury,” your practice page should cover what happens after a car accident in your state, what timelines typically look like, what paperwork people will be asked for, and what mistakes to avoid. Write that carefully, with transparent sourcing and updated dates, and watch the backlinks pile up.
Remember that Google explicitly treats links from prominent sites as an indicator of trustworthiness. If your page is the kind of thing a prominent site would want to reference, link building gets easier.
A simple internal move that pays off later is creating a “best page” for each core practice area and treating it as a flagship asset. This is also where you naturally add internal links to your homepage, about, reviews, and case studies pages, because those trust pages help the flagship page convert once the links start landing.
2. Use ethics rules as a competitive advantage
Legal link building has a built-in filter in that you can’t just do what any random ecommerce site does. And honestly, you should think of that as a good thing, because most “link building hacks” are just ways to pay for attention while pretending you didn’t.
ABA Model Rule 7.2 (and its commentary) is a helpful compass because it addresses paying others for recommending a lawyer’s services, with limited exceptions. Even when you’re operating within your state’s specific rules, the principle matters: if the link is effectively a paid recommendation, you’re in a zone that deserves extra caution.
So instead of trying to sneak around ethics, lean into them. Build links through things that look good in daylight:
- Publish a scholarship with transparent criteria and a real committee.
- Partner with a nonprofit on a clinic or workshop and let them list you as a resource.
- Offer a plain-English guide that a community org can share.
- Do a CLE talk and ask the hosting association to post the materials with your bio and site link.
None of this is “gaming SEO.” It’s just making yourself visible in places where visibility is earned.
3. Make reviews part of your link strategy
Reviews are not backlinks, but they shape the environment in which your backlinks land.
If a prospect clicks an article that cited you, then googles your name and sees a messy review footprint, the link did its job, and then your reputation fumbled the handoff.
BrightLocal’s 2025 Local Consumer Review Survey shows consumer trust in reviews has shifted over time. One headline stat is that the share of consumers who trust reviews as much as personal recommendations dropped noticeably compared to earlier years.
Source: BrightLocal
That doesn’t mean reviews no longer matter, of course. People keep using them and trusting them, if a little less than before. Local SEO stats note that a large share of consumers use Google to find local business reviews.
Source: BrightLocal
When link building for lawyers, the practical move is to connect the dots:
Include a short “What to expect when you contact us” section in your link-worthy resources, covering your response times and what info you’ll ask for. Then make sure your actual intake matches that promise.
Clio’s 2024 research on client engagement is a gut punch here: in their study of 500 firms, as many as 48% were unreachable by phone, and only 33% responded to email outreach.
Source: Clio
If you’re already investing in content or PR, audit your intake the same week. You can earn great links and still lose the case because you didn’t call back, so you’re paying to send prospects into a black hole.
4. Publish a local data story using public information
This is the most underused tactic we see with law firms, and it’s weird because lawyers are surrounded by public information all day. The same method is used by many eCommerce businesses and SaaS websites with great success.
The idea here is to create a small annual or quarterly report that summarizes a local trend in a way journalists and community orgs can cite. Just a clear summary of what’s happening, with sources and methodology.
Examples that tend to earn links:
- A landlord–tenant firm summarizes eviction filing trends using public court dashboards.
- A personal injury firm publishes a “high-risk intersections” report using city crash data.
- An employment firm tracks local WARN notices and explains what they mean in plain language.
- A family law firm summarizes changes in state family code updates.
When you do this right, your report becomes a local reference point that earns organic links from news sites, neighborhood blogs, universities, and even city resource pages.
Just keep your disclosure and sourcing clean. If you’re using endorsements or testimonials anywhere around that report, remember the FTC’s guidance: disclose material connections and don’t present distorted or manipulated review content as genuine consumer sentiment.
5: Build links around real-world trust signals
Google’s spam policies are very direct that buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive exchanges, and similar tactics are considered link spam. So, if the only reason a site is linking to you is that you paid for it, you are building on sand.
And if you are wondering whether the quality bar is getting higher, it is. Google publishes guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, and their rater guidelines emphasize evaluating reliability and usefulness using concepts like E-E-A-T (short for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).
One more reason to take trust seriously is that even when people find you through a search, they still cross-check. FindLaw’s 2024 U.S. Consumer Legal Needs Survey write-up reports 82% or respondents who contacted an attorney after learning about them online used online reviews as part of their decision-making.
How We Chose These Tips
We filtered everything through three questions:
- Would the tactic hold up to scrutiny? Rules vary by jurisdiction, but the principle is consistent: avoid anything that smells like paying for recommendations, and be cautious with lead-gen arrangements that imply endorsement.
- Is the link likely to be durable? A link from a real organization, publication, or community resource page tends to survive website redesigns and algorithm updates. A link on a guest post farm tends to disappear the moment someone stops paying.
- Does it compound? The best legal links also build trust, drive referrals, and enhance brand recognition. Those are the same signals that matter when prospects do what they almost always do: research you before hiring.
Conclusion
The unfortunate thing about legal link building is that you can do it perfectly and still lose.
You can earn a great local news mention, send a journalist a clean quote, get the link, and then miss the case because no one answered the phone. So, if you are building authority, make sure your intake can catch what authority sends you.
If you’re wondering where to start, choose one flagship guide that deserves links using the right tools, then run a link reclamation sweep for mentions you already earned. After that, build relationships in the local and professional ecosystems that your clients actually engage with.
Don’t waste any time! Check our pricing plan and start build up your link building plan!
